December 18, 2021 UPDATE

VISIT The PM of Romania Nicolae Ciucă will be on a visit to Brussels on Monday and Tuesday, for talks with senior EU and NATO officials. According to the Government, on Monday the Romanian PM will have a working dinner with the president of the European Council Charles Michael. On Tuesday, Ciucă will have meetings with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen and with other EC members. The PM will also have a meeting with the secretary general of NATO Jens Stoltenberg at the NATO headquarters.

BUDGET The government of Romania passed a number of measures on which the 2022 public budget is based. An emergency order freezing the salaries of public officials and other public sector staff, with 2 exceptions, was endorsed by the Cabinet with amendments compared to the version subject to public debate. The bill also includes other measures, such as a low VAT rate only for the purchase of a family's first home. The new tax provisions, alongside the new Ceilings Act, are the foundation of next year's state budget, and are designed to reduce expenditure and maintain the public deficit below 6.2% of GDP.

ANTI-CORRUPTION The government approved the 2021-2025 National Anti-Corruption Strategy, the justice minister Cătălin Predoiu announced. He pointed out that the document is a political commitment to support all institutions involved in fighting corruption, and also a first goal met out of the ones included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan in the judicial sector. Predoiu added that the Strategy is correlated with international instruments to which Romania is affiliated, such as GRECO and the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism. The CVM was introduced in January 2007, upon Romania's and Bulgaria's EU accession, to support the 2 countries in overcoming deficiencies in judicial reform and in fighting corruption.

BORDER As of Monday, December 20, travellers entering Romania are no longer required to fill in separate COVID-19 statement, because all the data will be included in the digital Passenger Locator Form (PLF). The measure is expected to help reduce waiting times at border checkpoints, including at the Henri Coanda Airport, near Bucharest. The transport minister Sorin Grindeanu Saturday requested the Airport management to take steps to streamline passenger flows and to avoid crowding. The request came after hundreds of people waited for a long time for the authorities to check their documents. Romanian border checkpoints are getting crowded these days, as many Romanians living abroad are coming home for Christmas. Queuing is reported at the checkpoints on Romania's western borders, where apart from travel documents the digital Covid certificates and PCR tests must also be checked. In order to streamline border crossing, at the checkpoint in Giurgiu (south), the number of border police will be increased by 20%.

MINORITIES Romania celebrated on December 18 the Day of Ethnic Minorities. President Klaus Iohannis said on this occasion that ethnic minorities make an essential contribution to social cohesion and that only together can a modern Romania be built, with no place for racism, xenophobia and intolerance. Protecting cultural heritage, including that of national minorities, is a priority for the Culture Ministry, which treasures the culture of minorities as an element contributing to the shaping of Romanian culture as we know it today, reads a news release issued by the institution.

COVID-19 733 new COVID-19 cases and 64 related fatalities were reported in the last 24 hours in Romania, the authorities announced on Saturday. The coordinator of the vaccination campaign, Valeriu Gheorghiţă, announced on the other hand that the number of people requesting their first doses of anti Sars-CoV-2 vaccine is on the decrease. He detailed that the number of people who get their first vaccine doses drops by 15-25% from one week to the next. On Saturday only 4,500 first doses were administered. Meanwhile, the Omicron variant of the virus has been reported in 89 countries, with the number of cases doubling over 1.5-3 days in areas with community transmission, the WHO announced on Saturday. WHO first labelled Omicron a variant of concern on November 26. (tr. A.M. Popescu)